The Department of Education continues to plod along with a Race to the Top, in similar style to the George Bush/Ted Kennedy No Child Left Behind educational plan. Race to the Top is a little flashier, as the current administration’s financial draw hauls in preschool standardized testing too. Private schools are currently exempt from these federal regulations.

Glenn Reynold’s question has been asked around by innovative educators, including homeschoolers. Logic should prevail it does not make sense to pull home educators into public school oversight, as teachers unions and many legislators incessantly attempt.

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is; into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.
When and where do people concentrate best? The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the individual. Some people are at their sharpest first thing in the morning. Some are more receptive late at night. One person requires a silent house to optimize his focus; another seems to think more clearly with music playing or against the white noise of a coffee shop. Given all these variations, why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?

A Homeschool Diaries excerpt below:

… the practical reasons for homeschooling are paramount. When you set the city’s gorgeous mosaic of intellectual and cultural offerings against its crazy quilt of formal education, you can’t help but want to supplement your children’s schooling with outings to museums, zoos, historic sites and neighborhoods, and the like. Even in a tight economy, just about every city cultural institution still has an educational division. Why “save” them for weekends or field trips?

Diane [Ravitch] is now making the same mistake, in reverse, that she and so many school choice and accountability enthusiasts made in the 1990s (and the same mistake that [Arne] Duncan makes today when he proclaims that charter schooling or merit pay “work”). Both Diane’s stance and Duncan’s reflect the misguided premise that chartering or accountability is a way to improve instruction–like a new curriculum, professional development model, or reading program–rather than an opportunity to create the conditions where sustained improvement in teaching and learning become possible.

A lack of choice can force educators to simultaneously serve families with very different demands and responses to discipline or calls for parental involvement, making it difficult to establish common norms. A lack of autonomy makes it difficult for principals to assemble a team of teachers who embrace shared expectations and instructional principles. The institutional and political turbulence endemic to school systems means that superintendents change jobs every few years, and district priorities and initiatives change along with them. Bureaucratic and contractual rules governing discipline, the school day, or professional development can trip up district leaders seeking to emulate effective school models.

Around and around they go. When will it be recognized that an institution can’t emulate the ‘family learning’ model?

Okay, I do make a jump in thinking there… Schools have been asked to fill the role of the family, more by default than design. Don’t read that looking for either an endorsement of public schools nor an attempt to spin out an ‘evil people at your local school…’ statement (most of the ‘evil spin’ language is projection – IMHO.)

It just appears to me that the nation has allowed itself to become as dependent on schools as, say, electricity or running water. A vast industry supports the institution of public schooling which feeds, and feeds off of this dependency. Schedules, careers, mortgages, futures are all based on schools being there. That dependency has locked most families into whatever new reform is rolled out to save the institution.

As schools keep needing to be ‘reformed,’ homeschooling just keeps working. Which takes me back to my question – when will it be recognized that an institution can’t emulate the family learning model?

The title of an article from December caught my eye, “Race to the Top” a short run to failure. But the subtitle piqued my interest, Obama’s new education plan is inherently flawed in its ignorance of reality and the factors influencing the lackluster performance of our schools.

So, food for thought on standardized tests from the next generation:

As was the case with No Child Left Behind, the stated goals of Race to the Top sound like no-brainers, but it is in the implementation that this plan fails to fundamentally improve the education system.

Specifically, the continued emphasis on standardized tests is alarming, the large focus on charter schools is unfortunate and the proposals for dealing with failing schools are unnecessarily and ineffectively harsh and disturbingly oversimplified.

Unfortunately, we can’t escape our unwarranted fixation on standardized tests as a method of evaluating students and teachers. I’ve written extensively about this in a previous column, so let me summarize:

“To expect a teacher to teach to a test is unreasonable because it expects the teacher to narrow his or her curriculum, rather than expand it, in the sense of depth rather than breadth of course. This ultimately does a disservice to students … To expect that students from all ranges of the spectrum of human experience can be measured by the same standards is highly ambitious and fairly absurd.”

Again, homeschooling is implicated in a decline in a school district’s enrollment. In this instance, the parents are said to be exercising their “right to school choice.” I don’t consider homeschooling to be part of the “school choice” package.

There are a variety of factors that contribute to the loss of students, Superintendent Richard Rossi pointed out, but said the economy is the most significant.

…

“In some cases, parents are exercising their right to school choice,” Borchilo said. “They may elect to home school, home tutor or enroll them in cyber services or private or parochial schools.”

“School choice” is a technical term decribing the government education system allowing parents to enroll their children in a public school other than the school attached to the child’s geographic home. If a family lives in School District A, then (most usually) the children go to school in District A. If parents want their children to attend the schools in District B, then they make use of “school choice.”

A system cannot offer choices not under the system’s control. For example, at suppertime I can tell my children that, they can have eggs and bacon, eggs and sausage or eggs and toast because we are having an ‘eggs and …’ supper. If they say they don’t want eggs and anything, I cannot tell them to go next-door and tell the neighbors’ to give my kids some of their pizza. The pizza is not mine to offer nor theirs to demand from others. My kids can go out and buy their own pizza (or ingredients), but if they eat at the family table, then their choice is limited to ‘eggs and …’ In the example, family supper choice does not include pizza.

The state education system can offer choice within its system. If parents choose something other than public schooling, then they have left the system.

If homeschooling parents accept the pigeonholing of homeschooling as “school choice,” and not as a natural right, then the homeschooling concept will move one more baby-step back towards the view that ‘education’ is one of the services that people cannot do for themselves (such as national defense) so that it is rightly a state undertaking.

Henry Cate at Why Homeschool, has a linkto a humorous post about the “NCLB version of football.” A couple of the funny points are that all teams will win championships and only game scores from the 4th, 8th and 11th games will count towards the team’s standing.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act does not apply to homeschooling families because the federal government does not give them any money for their children’s educations. Still, I must comment because this wording in the NCLB discussion bill puts everyday family life into federal law.

Miller-McKeon Discussion Draft, PDF-pages 276 – 277

(d) SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES FOR IMPROVED STUDENT ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT.As a component of the school-level parental involvement policy developed under subsection (b), each school served under this part shall jointly develop with parents for all children served under this part a school-parent compact that outlines how parents, the entire school staff, and students will share the responsibility for improved student academic achievement and the means by which the school and parents will build and develop a partnership to help children achieve the State’s high standards. Such compact shall

(1) describe the school’s responsibility to provide high-quality curriculum and instruction in a supportive and effective learning environment that enables the children served under this part to meet the State’s student academic achievement standards, and the ways in which each parent will be responsible for supporting their children’s learning, such as monitoring attendance, monitoring homework completion, and monitoring television watching; volunteering in their child’s classroom; and participating, as appropriate, in decisions relating to the education of their children and positive use of extracurricular time;

[emphasis added]

The tax dollars given to schools should support the children and families, not be a means to hold the children and families in thrall. For more on that attitude, see the post below about recapturing children.

I understand that the best use is made of the money given to schools if the children have safe, happy and interesting family lives. Children must be able to take in the attention given to them in school or that time and money is wasted. But having the federal government legislate parental responsibilities, especially by presuming that Federal Knows Best on the “positive use of extracurricular time” — as if childhood is merely an adjunct to ‘curricular time,’ i.e., school! — is an affront.

Whoever wrote this must not see families as sons and daughters, mothers and fathers; that person or people must see us as students and employees.